Nursing is a caring profession. It is also a profession that is becoming more evidence based on practice. To the extent that the scientific aspects of nursing are increasing due to the complex technological advancement of medicine and the machinery that is used at the patient’s bedside, the truth is that the nurse is the first person with whom the client usually comes into contact in any emergency or hospital.
Having said this, the term “caring” is an essential emotion that all nurses, indeed, all individuals in the healthcare profession must possess. With caring comes the trained ability of the nurse to facilitate therapeutic communication. One might ask, what is therapeutic communication? To better answer this question, the term communication must first be defined.
Communication can be defined as “The process of conveying messages and interpreting meaning.” (Wilson et al., 1995) With therapeutic communication, the sender or nurse seeks to elicit a response from the receiver, the patient, that is beneficial to the patient’s mental and physical health. Just as stress has been shown to negatively affect people’s health, the therapeutic approach to communication can help. In any given situation, everyone uses communication.
Everyone has seen the individual who appears to be angry, stressed, sick, or perhaps sad. These emotions are communicated to others not always with words, but with gestures and facial expressions. A nurse should always be aware of these expressions in clients, as these expressions may be the only way the nurse can tell if there is something else that needs her attention. The term given to this type of nonverbal communication is called metacommunication. In metacommunication, the client can look at her amputated stump and say that it doesn’t really look that bad, while at the same time tears well up in her eyes.
In a case like this, the nurse needs to stay and explore further how the person is really feeling. There are many factors associated with the healing and comforting aspects of therapeutic communication. Circumstances, setting, and time all play a role in the effect of therapeutic communication. If a client is being rushed in for emergency surgery, there may not be time for bedside conversation, but holding a hand could convey much more than words to the client at that moment.
Ideally, for therapeutic communication to be effective, the nurse must be aware of how she presents herself to the client. If a nurse seems rushed, for example, she is talking fast, her countenance looks haunted and she is breathing hard, her eyes are not on the client but perhaps on an IV bag on the client in the nurse’s bed. next to. In a case like this, there is nothing that this nurse can therapeutically tell the client that the client can believe. The helping relationship has not been established and therefore therapeutic communication cannot be facilitated. Some of the emotions associated with therapeutic communication include, but are not limited to, the following: professionalism, confidentiality, courtesy, trust, availability, empathy, and sympathy. (Potter, Patricia A., Perry, Anne G., Co. 2003, Nursing Essentials for Practice, p. 123, Mosby)
All of these emotions enter into the nurse-client relationship, which should be established by the nurse as soon as possible upon first meeting the client. To begin to establish this nurse-client relationship, the nurse must assess the general message that the client is communicating to her, such as fear, pain, sadness, anxiety, or apathy. The nurse must be trained to introduce the message that the client is sending. Only then can the nurse determine the best therapeutic approach. Anyone who has to be admitted to a hospital or emergency room has a level of anxiety.
This level can go up considerably when the client feels that they have been abandoned or that there is no one there who really cares about how they feel. When a client is the recipient of therapeutic communication from a caring person, a level of trust is achieved and more than the client’s total competence can change for the better. Your blood pressure, breathing, and stress levels may all drop simultaneously. When this occurs, pain management, if any, can be resolved more quickly. The goal of a nurse is to become competent in medicine.
Learn more about nursing education in the NET Study Guide.